4 Excellent Online Portfolio Options for Marketing Creatives

Whether you’re a veteran or just starting out of school, if you’re a marketing creative you need a portfolio if you hope to advance your career.

It’s by far the best way prospective employers , marketing recruiters and creative staffing agencies can find out what you’re capable of. If you’re looking to take the next step in your career, you’ll always be overlooked when competing against candidates with an impressive and easily accessible online portfolio.

Building a basic marketing portfolio isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Consider these portfolio-hosting options to establish your accomplishments visually online and show off your creative ability:

This free portfolio site is home to my own personal portfolio, so I can speak about it with a little experience. I’m not a particularly design-minded person, so I needed an option that was fairly idiot-proof when it came to coherently and attractively displaying my work. After fiddling with a handful of portfolio hosting options, I found Coroflot best for my relatively simple needs.

This site is a great platform for showing off your creations in a clean, sharp, modern design. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles, so if you’re the kind of person who wants lots of customization options and functionalities you should consider another option. But Coroflot is refreshingly simple and fast to set up. The portfolio-building tool is very user friendly and intuitive, the perfect option for someone who needs a no-frills way to let their work speak for itself.

Another fairly straightforward portfolio site, Carbonmade boasts simplicity and a quirky attitude. Really; the site is covered in unicorns and their dogs are listed as staff. It’s worth checking out just for the fun factor.

But beneath the bright, colorful surface of whacky vocabulary and cute icons is an effective and functional portfolio-building tool. Just pick from a handful of premade Themes, insert your work and publish. Portfolios look clean and professional—if a little bit uniform.

Carbonmade charges a monthly fee which is pretty affordable if you just want to post a few projects. But if you’re incredibly accomplished and want to show more than 50, the cost can get fairly substantial. Yearly subscriptions at discounted rates are also available.

We’ve seen many marketers’ portfolios built with Behance’s Prosite service. This platform allows for a lot of customization, starting from one of several base layouts and modifying from there. With features like blog integration and the ability to custom-craft column sizes, it allows you to personalize and get very creative. And it allows HTML and CSS customization if you’re comfortable with modifying code.

The amount of features might be overwhelming to some, but Prosite comes with a lot of helpful step-by-step videos to get you started. You can build your portfolio for free, but will have to pay a modest fee to actually publish it.

The DIY Portfolio

If you’re confident in your coding and design skills, you can really impress hiring managers and marketing staffing firms by placing your portfolio on a website that you build yourself. It’s never been easier to put together an attractive website of your own, even if you don’t have a lot of web development experience. This has a number of benefits:

Complete control of everything that shows up on the page—no potentially distracting advertisements or portfolio site logos.

Greater flexibility to craft your portfolio in a way that matches your vision and personal brand.

An additional opportunity to show off your creative, web design and programming abilities—incredibly valuable traits in any modern marketer.

Other Options

These are just a few of the portfolio sites we see frequently used with success—but there are many others. If you consider these options and aren’t satisfied with their services, there are many other free and paid portfolio publishers. Do a little research and find what works best for you.

Don’t Wait to Build Your Personal Brand Online

Remember, the best time to build and maintain a portfolio is when you’re comfortably employed. If you constantly update with your latest works you won’t forget to add any of your best work and will be able to include the most important details while they’re fresh on your mind. If you haven’t made an online portfolio yet, consider doing so now. If you have an older one gathering dust, look to update it soon. You never know when it will come in handy. And be sure to add the web address to your resumes so creative staffing agencies potential employers can find it!

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